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Professor Julia Mannherz

I first became interested Russian culture after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when my West German school began offering Russian lessons to students who had recently moved there from the East. Fortunately, it also allowed Westerners like me to go along.

Later, I studied history and Slavonic studies at the universities of Bonn and Kazan', before coming to Britain to take an MA at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in London and a doctorate at Cambridge in 2005. I moved to Oxford in 2007, after having lectured at the universities of London and Göttingen.

At undergraduate level, I teach nineteenth- and twentieth-century European history and historiography, including general history papers 11-14 and the optional subject "Romance of the People" (with David Hopkin). I also teach "Theory and Methods" for Master's students and I am keen to supervise interesting research projects in nineteenth and twentieth century Russian history.

I work on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cultural history of the Russian empire and am especially interested in interdisciplinary approaches. My recent book Modern Occultism in Late Imperial Russia (Northern Illinois University Press 2012) analyzes the widespread fascination with the supernatural in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Russia and its role in contemporary discussions about science, folklore, literature and theology. Currently, I am editing a volume devoted to conceptions of "the irrational" in Russian culture, and I am developing a new research project on local music making in Russia's Perm province (whose capital is Oxford's twin city!).

Selected publications

Books

Modern Occultism in Late Imperial Russia. Northern Illinois University Press. 2012.

Articles

“Nationalism, Imperialism and Cosmopolitanism in Russian Nineteenth-Century Provincial Amateur Music-Making”, The Slavonic and East European Review, 95, 2017. 293-319.